The Poet’s “Long-Range Heart” (O. Mandelstam. The Poem of an Unknown Soldier)

Abstract

The article suggests a detailed analysis of the most significant and complicated work in O. Mandelstam’s late poetry — The Poem of an Unknown Soldier (1937) which is being examined in the context of the poet’s whole literary heritage. Radical metaphorism, which was previously characteristic of the poet, is pushed here to the extreme; poetics of reminiscences and subtexts appears to be the basis for the composition of this long poem. A detailed examination of the poem’s world, explanation and sometimes deciphering of its poetic images obviously demonstrate the arrival of new poetics, the basis of which in the work is the “Heraclitean metaphor” (O. Mandelstam’s term), revealing fluidity, internal dynamics of images that create a horrible picture of the war as an ultimate disaster and of an individual (the poet) as its antipode and victim. The poet’s thought is directed to the picture of an eternal, immortal military formation where in the roar of the military roll call, voices of fallen soldiers merge with those of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and where the poet’s voice is heard among others — standing here, calling his “unreliable” year of birth and seing the whole path of human history caught in the fire of the Apocalypse.

Keywords

• o. mandelstam
• the poem of an unknown soldier
• long poem
• metaphorism
• tradition.